The Clergy in Khaki

New Perspectives on British Army Chaplaincy in the First World War

Edward Madigan, Michael Snape

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317037989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

British army chaplains have not fared well in the mythology of the First World War. Like its commanders they have often been characterized as embodiments of ineptitude and hypocrisy. Yet, just as historians have reassessed the motives and performance of British generals, this collection offers fresh insights into the war record of British chaplains. Drawing on the expertise of a dozen academic researchers, the collection offers an unprecedented analysis of the subject that embraces military, political, religious and imperial history. The volume also benefits from the professional insights of chaplains themselves, several of its contributors being serving or former members of the Royal Army Chaplains' Department. Providing the fullest and most objective study yet published, it demonstrates that much of the post-war hostility towards chaplains was driven by political, social or even denominational agendas and that their critics often overlooked the positive contribution that chaplains made to the day-to-day struggles of soldiers trying to cope with the appalling realities of industrial warfare and its aftermath. As the most complete study of the subject to date, this collection marks a major advance in the historiography of the British army, of the British churches and of British society during the First World War, and will appeal to researchers in a broad range of academic disciplines.

Chapter 1
Introduction: British Army Chaplaincy in Context

Edward Madigan and Michael Snape

In the decade before the outbreak of the First World War, army chaplaincy was a matter of relatively little concern to the clergy and laity of Britain’s various religious traditions. The British army itself, in stark contrast to its continental counterparts, was a comparatively small, well-trained professional force that was deployed mostly to police Britain’s colonial territories. It recruited its officers from among the peerage, the landed gentry and select sections of the middle classes, while its other ranks were drawn from the disenfranchised urban and rural poor. The experience of the South African War, the formation of the Territorial Force in 1908 and, not least, the poetry and prose of Rudyard Kipling ensured that soldiers were commonly regarded with less suspicion than during the Victorian period, but the vast majority of Britons had no close familial links with the army. As an institution, it was thus not subjected to a great deal of public scrutiny, at least by comparison with the Royal Navy, which was lavishly funded from the public purse and, both in terms of the way it was perceived and in reality, was the ultimate guarantor of Britain’s security. The Army Chaplains’ Department (AChD) of the pre-war period was therefore responsible for catering to the religious needs of regular officers and men who did not generally represent, or greatly interact with, British society at large.

Chaplains’ duties in the pre-war army were very much focused on the demands of garrison life in Britain, Ireland and the colonies. King’s Regulations stipulated that army chaplains, or ‘padres’, should preside over regular church parade services and funerals, but they also busied themselves giving religious instruction in army schools, visiting prisoners in military custody and providing recreational and welfare facilities.1 Edwardian army chaplains thus provided important, even vital, services in Britain and overseas and were an integral part of regular army life. They were few in number, however, with no more than 120 commissioned chaplains and less than 50 full-time ‘acting chaplains’ (many of whom were probationers) serving an army of almost 250,000 officers and men. Although religious ministry to the army was widely assisted by a further category of civilian clergymen who were employed on a local basis as ‘officiating clergymen’, only three denominations – Anglican, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic – were officially represented among the army’s commissioned chaplains. Furthermore, while some Nonconformist ministers (especially Wesleyans) served as acting chaplains, neither British Jewry nor many important Protestant denominations had commissioned or acting chaplains of their own. If some pre-war chaplains proved energetic and committed to their ministry, dynamic and ambitious younger clergymen rarely sought a chaplain’s commission. Thus, although ‘religion’, in the broadest sense of the term, remained a pervasive and undeniable part of British society during the Edwardian period, most British people were unconcerned with the religious affairs of the army or the spiritual welfare of regular soldiers, and army chaplains occupied at best a peripheral place in public life.

The advent of war in August 1914 was to transform this situation dramatically. As soon as war was declared, the character and size of the army itself began to change with the mobilization of the Territorial Force and the recall to the colours of as many as 200,000 reservists. More importantly, however, hundreds of thousands of men who would never have considered military service in peacetime were now seeking to enlist in the ranks or gain commissions in the officer corps. Popular enthusiasm for war in Britain was exaggerated both by contemporaries and in later historical accounts,2 but volunteerism was a very real phenomenon.3 The opening months of the war saw British men representing almost every conceivable trade and profession, and religious denomination, flock to recruiting stations. By the end of 1915 over 2 million men from across the British Isles had volunteered for some form of military service. Most of these men joined the divisions of Lord Kitchener’s new armies, and from early 1916 until the Armistice their ranks would be replenished and reinforced by hundreds of thousands of conscripts. Over the course of the conflict the British army thus evolved from a small, socially homogenous, professional force into an enormous citizen army in which virtually all of Britain’s regional, social and religious communities were represented.

This process of wartime growth and evolution had a profound impact on the AChD. In August 1914 the Department comprised a mere 117 commissioned padres – 89 Anglican, 17 Roman Catholic, and 11 Presbyterian – along with a further 37 acting chaplains of various denominations.4 By November 1918 no less than 5,053 new commissions had been granted to clergymen belonging to a great variety of religious communities, and the Department had been subjected to significant levels of public scrutiny, undergone major structural change and been transformed into a body of men that genuinely reflected the diversity of British religious life. Quite apart from the Department itself, the war had a major influence on those who volunteered for service as army chaplains. Over the course of more than four years of hostilities, thousands of British clergymen, including some of the most dynamic and talented clerics of their generation, experienced war at first hand and were shaped by that experience. When Britain began to mobilize, just 52 regular chaplains had seen active service in wartime;5 by the Armistice over 170 padres had died, hundreds of others had been decorated for meritorious service, and chaplains had ministered to British troops in every theatre of war. From being regarded as something of an encumbrance in the very early days of the war, the clergy in khaki came to be recognized by the military authorities for the support they provided to soldiers in the field, and, in particular, for the role they played in the maintenance of troop morale. In their correspondence with the families of fallen soldiers, moreover, chaplains also provided an important channel of communication between the army and a civilian population that suffered unprecedented levels of bereavement.

When considering the operational role, experiences and legacy of the British army chaplains who served during the First World War, it is important to remember that the various religious bodies that these men represented all supported the war effort to a greater or lesser extent. The German violation of Belgian neutrality gave the British government a legitimate casus belli, but German violence against French and Belgian civilians persuaded many in Britain that the Allied cause was not only legitimate but morally righteous. When British civilians fell victim to enemy aggression in the Zeppelin and U-boat campaigns of 1915 the popular perception of the war as a righteous crusade was further reinforced.6 The highly moral prism through which the war was perceived, especially in 1914 and 1915, meant that clergymen often felt that it was very much within their remit to comment on the war and interpret it in religious terms. The clergy were occasionally made the target of quite trenchant criticism in Edwardian Britain, and there was anxiety in certain quarters about declining interest in formal religious observance.7 But the priests and ministers of the various churches remained a powerful, influential force in British society, and their views on the war were listened to by significant numbers of British people. Clerical support for the war manifested itself in a variety of different ways and it should be stressed that some voices were less strident than others, that not all clergymen were actively involved in recruitment, and that certain prominent clergymen advocated a spirit of calm conciliation towards the German people.8 There was also at least some clerical questioning of British military methods, if not the war itself, when the Archbishop of Canterbury offered mild criticism of the British use of poison gas and the decision to bomb German cities in reprisal for German air raids on Britain.9

These nuances notwithstanding, it is striking just how unanimous and widespread church support for the war actually was. This is perhaps unsurprising in the cases of the established churches of England and Scotland, but British and Irish Roman Catholics and the clergy of most of the various Nonconformist churches across the British Isles, along with the leaders of the British Jewish community, all either acquiesced in, or actively supported, the war.10 Even the influential Society of Friends, the most traditionally pacifist of the Nonconformist denominations and the most equivocal in its stance on the conflict, stopped short of condemning the British declaration of war and the subsequent national mobilization.11 Dissenting clerical voices were not unheard of,12 but no more than a handful of clergymen appear to have publicly opposed the war. This widespread support for the war among the British clergy partly reflects the generally pro-war, anti-German mood of the wider population. Yet it also reveals an apparently sincere clerical understanding of the conflict as a just war – a view that clergymen were keen to share with their congregations.

In the context of the army chaplains who saw service on the various fighting fronts between 1914 and 1918, the pro-war stance of the British churches is important for a number of reasons. To begin with, the interpretation of the war as a moral crusade, which was actively disseminated by the churches, meant that many pious and respectable British men who would never have enlisted in the regular army felt that volunteering to fight was now a moral imperative. This is particularly true of Nonconformists and Jews, who had traditionally shown little interest in military service. Such men would require the sort of religious ministration that could only be provided by accredited clergy-in-uniform. In addition, from the perspective of the junior clergy, the generally pro-war stance of their churches meant that they were under acute pressure to be seen to be doing their bit. This factor became increasingly important as the war dragged on, the death tolls in the various theatres mounted, and it simply became untenable for relatively young and healthy clergymen to avoid some sort of service. It should also be emphasized that many British priests and ministers, of all ages, genuinely desired to serve their country in a just cause and at a time of national crisis. These pressures meant that hundreds of Protestant clergymen even enlisted as combatants, serving in the ranks and as officers. However, most of the leaders of the various churches probably concurred with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who insisted in September 1914 that the position of a ‘combatant in our Army is incompatible with the position of one who has sought Holy Orders’.13

Although a further category also served as non-combatants in the Royal Army Medical Corps, the overwhelming majority of clergymen who served in the British army in the First World War did so as non-combatant chaplains. In this capacity they were able to retain their civilian role as spiritual leaders while ministering to soldiers in the various theatres of war. The terms of service under which they operated meant that the army’s temporary padres effectively provided a living link between Britain’s citizen soldiers and the churches on the home front. The story of the British army chaplains who served between 1914 and 1918 is thus, in many respects, the story of Britain’s religious communities at war.

Since the bicentenary of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department in 1996, British army chaplaincy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the subject of a good deal of historiographical scrutiny. James Hagerty and Tom Johnstone’s The Cross on the Sword, published to mark the bicentenary, offered an absorbing narrative account of the contribution made by Roman Catholic chaplains to army life from the Catholic Relief Acts of the later eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth and brought a range of new archival sources to light.14 Stephen Louden’s brief Chaplains in Conflict, also published in 1996, adopted a more argument-driven approach and looked at the period from 1914 to the 1950s.15 Drawing on sociological studies conducted in the years after the Second World War, Louden was particularly concerned with the issue of role tension as experienced by padres in wartime and argued that the competing allegiances they owed to church, state and army presented Anglican chaplains, in particular, with an irresolvable conflict. Although these books marked the end of a long period of historiographical silence on British army chaplaincy, they addressed much broader periods than that of the First World War and were also limited in their denominational focus.

More recently, concise monographs by Neil Allison and Linda Parker have sought to highlight the achievements of United Board and Anglican padres during the First World War. The first volume of Allison’s Official History of the United Board, published in 2008, examines the fortunes of Baptist, Congregationalist and certain Methodist chaplains (banded together as the United Board) from 1914 to the outbreak of the Second World War and adds significantly to our knowledge of an active, vocal but relatively under-researched body of British clergymen.16 Parker’s The Whole Armour of God, which appeared in 2009, provides a stimulating introduction to the wartime experiences of Church of England chaplains – the most numerous but also the most misunderstood of the clergy in khaki.17 The editors of the current volume have also made a number of academic contributions to the theme with the publications of God and the British Soldier (2005), and F...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: British Army Chaplaincy in Context
• 2 The Nonconformist Chaplain in the First World War: The Importance of a New Phenomenon
• 3 Free Church Revivalism in the British Army during the First World War
• 4 A Welsh Perspective on Army Chaplaincy during the First World War: The Letters of Abraham Rees Morgan MC
• 5 Garrisoning the Nation’s Soul: Calvinism, Douglas Haig and Scottish Presbyterian Chaplaincy on the Western Front
• 6 The Theology of ‘Woodbine Willie’ in Context
• 7 Chaplains in Context: British Army Padres and the ‘Bureaucracy of Paternalism’ in the First World War
• 8 Catholic Army Chaplaincy and Episcopal Tensions: The Vatican and the Appointment of an Episcopus Castrensis
• 9 The First World War and the Chaplains of British India
• 10 Visions from the Front: Discourse on the Post-war World among Anglican Army Chaplains in 1918
• 11 ‘Shell-shocked Prophets’: Anglican Army Chaplains and Post-war Reform in the Church of England
• 12 The Royal Army Chaplains’ Department and the Legacy of the First World War
• Index